Byron, George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron

He was the son of Capt. John (
"Mad Jack"
) Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon of Gight. His father died in 1791, and Byron, born with a clubfoot, was subjected alternately to the excessive tenderness and violent temper of his mother. In 1798, after years of poverty, Byron succeeded to the title and took up residence at the family seat, Newstead Abbey. He subsequently attended Dulwich school and Harrow (1801–5) and then matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Although the academic atmosphere did nothing to lessen Byron's sensitivity about his lameness, he made several close friends while at school.

His first volume, Fugitive Pieces (1806), was suppressed; revised and expanded, it appeared in 1807 as Poems on Various Occasions. This was followed by Hours of Idleness (1807), which provoked such severe criticism from the Edinburgh Review that Byron replied with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a satire in heroic couplets reminiscent of Pope, which brought him immediate fame.

Byron left England the same year for a grand tour through Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Balkans. He returned in 1811 with Cantos I and II of Childe Harold (1812), a melancholy, philosophic poem in Spenserian stanzas, which made him the social lion of London. It was followed by the verse tales The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814), The Siege of Corinth (1816), and Parisina (1816).

Byron's name at this time was linked with those of several women, notably Viscount Melbourne's wife, Lady Caroline Lamb. In Jan., 1815, he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, a serious, rather cold, young woman with whom he had little in common. She gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada, the following December. In 1816 she secured a separation. Although her reasons for such an action remain obscure, evidence indicates that she discovered the existence of an incestuous relationship between Byron and his half-sister, Mrs. Augusta Leigh. Although his many attachments to women are notorious, Byron was actually ambivalent toward women. There is considerable evidence that he also had several homosexual relationships.

Later Life and Works

In Apr., 1816, by then a social outcast, Byron left England, never to return. He passed some time with Shelley in Switzerland, writing Canto III of Childe Harold (1816) and The Prisoner of Chillon (1816). With the party was Shelley's sister-in-law, Claire Clairmont, who had practically forced Byron into a liaison before he left England, and who, in Jan., 1817, bore him a daughter, Allegra.

Settling in Venice (1817), Byron led for a time a life of dissipation, but produced Canto IV of Childe Harold (1818), Beppo (1818), and Mazeppa (1819) and began Don Juan. In 1819 he formed a liaison with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who remained his acknowledged mistress for the rest of his life. Byron was induced to interest himself in the cause of Greek independence from the Turks and sailed for Missolonghi, where he arrived in 1824. He worked unsparingly with Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos to unify the divergent Greek forces, but caught a fever and died the same year.

Assessment

Ranked with Shelley and Keats as one of the great Romantic poets, Byron became famous throughout Europe as the embodiment of romanticism. His good looks, his lameness, and his flamboyant lifestyle all contributed to the formation of the Byronic legend. By the mid-20th cent. his reputation as a poet had been eclipsed by growing critical recognition of his talents as a wit and satirist.

Byron's poetry covers a wide range. In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and in The Vision of Judgment (1822) he wrote 18th-century satire. He also created the
"Byronic hero,"
who appears consummately in the Faustian tragedy Manfred (1817)—a mysterious, lonely, defiant figure whose past hides some great crime. Cain (1821) raised a storm of abuse for its skeptical attitude toward religion. The verse tale Beppo is in the ottava rima (eight-line stanzas in iambic pentameter) that Byron later used for his acknowledged masterpiece Don Juan (1819–24), an epic-satire combining Byron's art as a storyteller, his lyricism, his cynicism, and his detestation of convention.

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Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron

Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron (1788–1824). Succeeded to the barony and Newstead abbey in 1798. After Harrow and Cambridge he embarked on the grand tour and a life of dissipation which provided material for his verses, in 1812 waking to find himself famous with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold. In politics associated with the Holland House set, his maiden speech was on the Nottinghamshire frame-breakers' bill, but he left England in 1816 after separating from his wife, heiress Annabella Milbanke. On the continent he befriended Shelley, was present at the inception of Frankenstein, and published a stream of verse romances refining the features of the ‘Byronic hero’, a gloomy self-projection of their author, which shocked and fascinated Regency England. Affecting an aristocratic disdain for writers who were ‘all inky thumbs’, he was a more serious artist than he admitted. Saluted in Italy as ‘il poeta della rivoluzione’, in 1824 his love of liberty took him to fight in the Greek War for Independence. He died of fever at Missolonghi, his masterpiece Don Juan unfinished. Though the obituaries regretted such ‘elaborate lampoons’, the 20th cent. generally preferred his more satirical vein.

John Saunders

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Byron, George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron

Byron, George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron (1788–1824) English poet. After a childhood scarred by the handicap of a clubfoot and maltreatment by his mother, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge (1805). Although Byron achieved notice with the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), it was the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) that brought him fame. His romantic image and reputation for dissolute living and numerous sexual affairs vied with his poetic reputation. By 1816 he was a social outcast and went into permanent exile. Abroad, Byron wrote Cantos III and IV of Childe Harold (1816, 1818) and Don Juan (1819–24), an epic satire often regarded as his masterpiece. In 1823 he travelled to Greece to fight for Greek independence against the Turks and died of fever at Missolonghi.

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